Online video games and cloud gaming are rapidly growing in pervasiveness. Their resource demands can put significant stress on the global communication infrastructure. And network conditions are amongst the chief factors that influence one’s enjoyment while playing games. This makes it imperative for video games to be considered for network dimensioning, server placement or protocol development. For that reason, in this work we provide an introduction to the technical aspects of video games in general and of their network aspects in particular. This understanding forms the basis for a rich taxonomy of factors that influence and provide context to a video game’s Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). The taxonomy covers influence factors from all aspects involved in a video game, from the subjective player and game influence factors to the system and networking influence factors. Finally, this work gives an overview of conducted and ongoing research as well as future research opportunities while taking into account lessons learned from past approaches.

Around 4.9 billion Internet users worldwide watch billions of hours of online video every day. As a result, streaming is by far the predominant type of traffic in communication networks. According to Google statistics, three out of five video views come from mobile devices. Thus, in view of the continuous technological advances in end devices and increasing mobile use, datasets for mobile streaming are indispensable in research but only sparsely dealt with in literature so far. With this public dataset, we provide 1,081 hours of time-synchronous video measurements at network, transport, and application layer with the native YouTube streaming client on mobile devices. The dataset includes 80 network scenarios with 171 different individual bandwidth settings measured in 5,181 runs with limited bandwidth, 1,939 runs with emulated 3 G/4 G traces, and 4,022 runs with pre-defined bandwidth changes. This corresponds to 332 GB video payload. We present the most relevant quality indicators for scientific use, i.e., initial playback delay, streaming video quality, adaptive video quality changes, video rebuffering events, and streaming phases.

The Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is one of the fastest growing Internet of Things (IoT) access protocols. It operates in the license free 868 MHz band and gives everyone the possibility to create their own small sensor networks. The drawback of this technology is often unscheduled or random channel access, which leads to message collisions and potential data loss. For that reason, recent literature studies alternative approaches for LoRaWAN channel access. In this work, state-of-the-art random channel access is compared with alternative approaches from the literature by means of collision probability. Furthermore, a time scheduled channel access methodology is presented to completely avoid collisions in LoRaWAN. For this approach, an exhaustive simulation study was conducted and the performance was evaluated with random access cross-traffic. In a general theoretical analysis the limits of the time scheduled approach are discussed to comply with duty cycle regulations in LoRaWAN.

Streaming video is responsible for the bulk of Internet traffic these days. For this reason, Internet providers and network operators try to make predictions and assessments about the streaming quality for an end user. Current monitoring solutions are based on a variety of different machine learning approaches. The challenge for providers and operators nowadays is that existing approaches require large amounts of data. In this work, the most relevant quality of experience metrics, i.e., the initial playback delay, the video streaming quality, video quality changes, and video rebuffering events, are examined using a voluminous data set of more than 13,000 YouTube video streaming runs that were collected with the native YouTube mobile app. Three Machine Learning models are developed and compared to estimate playback behavior based on uplink request information. The main focus has been on developing a lightweight approach using as few features and as little data as possible, while maintaining state-of-the-art performance.

The growing popularity of LoRa-based solutions, such as weather, environmental, and climate monitoring, has resulted in larger LoRaWAN deployments and increased network load. However, the random channel access method used in LoRaWAN leads to higher message collision probabilities and potential data loss, diminishing the network’s energy efficiency. This article addresses this issue by proposing a hardware-independent model that assesses energy consumption and efficiency in different LoRaWAN channel access approaches. Through simulation and analysis of real energy values, we provide insights and recommendations for optimizing the network performance and energy usage. This study fills a research gap and contributes to the development of more robust and energy-efficient LoRaWAN systems for various application areas.